Apr

Thoughts on desire

Spring is here. Until recently, I’ve had some ambivalence about the season.

Out come the flirty dresses and the pretty skirts. Because I’m out more, I tend to get more attention, not all of it welcome. For instance, I was propositioned by the lawn guy, who is an otherwise very nice ~~SO MARRIED AND NOT REALLY MY TYPE!~~ guy.

Even if he were single, my heart isn’t really in it.

I told one of my friends I think my fun button is broken.

My favorite of the marriage equality signs. Love is love.

Some of it is being busy. More of it has to do with the energy it takes to grow and change, to move in a new direction. I don’t ever admit this in public, but…I’m tired. Like, all the time.

It’s a great direction, one that I’ve worked hard for. But it’s still new. And I liked the old me, my old habits.

They were comfy security blankets.

There’s something really great about bad habits, even when you know they’re bad. I kind of enjoyed being blissfully ignorant, except that there’s nothing really great about ignorance when you know that’s what it is. Life does seem simpler when you don’t know what you don’t know.

On the matter of desire, especially.

When I simply wanted someone to show up for me the way I wanted them to, I could generally mask self-sabotage by telling myself that guys just “weren’t ready for this jelly” or some other Beyoncé lyric. The truth was harder for me to accept, that I was trying to be a hunter-gathering goddess on the love front – “I’m goin’ huntin’!” — applying my work ethic to matters of the heart. I know, I know: men say they like it when women chase them. But I think there’s a coy way that men like this to happen that might be a gender rule I’m making up, but I almost never operated that way.

Maybe I just needed face paint and that would’ve helped more? (From Petersenshunting.com)

I think this is why it’s easier for folks to play games.If you’re just playing around, if it doesn’t work out, you can just pretend to shrug it off and save face. Because you weren’t serious, allegedly.

There are still things that I’m passionate about, but dating is not one of them, for this very reason.

Except, the weird thing about desire is that sometimes when you stop chasing the thing you want the most in the world, it starts chasing you.

This has come up a couple of times, but most recently I noticed it when I went into a store where I crushed very hard years ago on a local dude I’ll call Steve.

Steve was kind of a jerk, because I used to really like jerks (it was a way of being mean to myself, enduring the company of guys who made Kanye West seem congenial.)

And he liked me. I think.

At the very least, he gave me free food, and his sister thought we should get together and he even sometimes took long walks with me to get coffee when I was in the neighborhood. So, I gave him my number.

He never called. I let it go.

Years have passed since I’ve been a frequent customer. Because, you know. Pride.

Only funny because it’s true! In my case, more like ambivalence.

Well, I dropped by the other day, just because I was hungry and it was on my way home and he was there. I thought he was going to jump out of his skin. He was super…melodramatic. “Where have you been?!”

“Writing. Around. Living,” I said. I wasn’t trying to be dispassionate. I was just confused by this enthusiasm.

“It’s so good to see you. Don’t be a stranger.”

Huh. The difference four years makes? Maybe. Also, everybody says that to everybody. Don’t be a stranger. It doesn’t mean “I’ll call you soon for a date.”

I suck my teeth when people talk about how women shouldn’t be afraid to approach men, because sometimes men are terrified of us. If I had a dollar for every time I asked ~~the wrong~~ a guy out, I’d be rich. I know that guys hear all this stuff about independent women, and how they think those of us who are feminists don’t “need” them — but none of that matters. Who cares about necessity when what you really want is for someone to want you the way you want them?

I’ve been reading Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, in which she writes about vulnerability. I love me some Brené Brown in general, but also because reading her work has led me to a really important conclusion about my own vulnerability. I realized reading this book that sharing my love and heart with people irrespective of their capacity for intimacy has been a habit for a long time. All the scars that come with dating the wrong people come from this assumption that there is something more that I could do or become or achieve that would make the difference when really, at the end of the day, we just weren’t compatible.

I used to be bound to a twisted, limited notion of love and desire, one that considered love/affection a response to a deep need for validation, a thirst for healing and rescue, an unnecessary burden I never had to carry but decided to anyway. I’m not sorry that I have compromised my heart and my dignity through despair and on my way to healing, but I wish I’d figured this out a little sooner.

It would mean that I’d get to see jerks like the shopkeeper without averting my eyes in shame or irritation that he couldn’t see what I gift I was then, though he sees it now. What spring offers me this year, like every year, is a gift. Yes, the pretty skirts and the nice dresses, but also the promise of a fresh start. A new way of thinking about what desire really means, what it feels like with a heart that’s more open and not so bogged down with immature notions.

49 days ago Short URL 6 Comments

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Mar

On Single Parents and Respect

The season of parental celebrations is coming.

After a crazy March, I glanced up from my car to see that Mother’s Day was coming.

I wrote last year about my first season without parents and what it felt like to be without my Mom and my Dad for the first time. My loved ones told me that anniversaries would be hard and oddly enough, that helped. The twinge I get now isn’t really about what I’m missing — it was before, when they were alive. Now I feel something more like…love. Respect. Honor.

I stay out of discussions about single mothers and parents. I actively chose not to be a single teenage parent, which I write about in Get Out of My Crotch. This is not because I felt ashamed, per se, of growing up the way I did and mistaking sex for love or a way to feel worthy, but because I watched how hard my mother’s life was as a single parent, and I knew that I wasn’t up for the task.

There was also the fear, of course, of being a statistic. This is both the artist in me, the creative, who wants to be fully seen and acknowledged as unique and the black woman intellectual in me, who understands that what and who I am on the outside is always judged first as the total of what I am on the inside — even if it is incomplete or flat-out wrong.

But underneath the fear of being a statistic, which I am as a single, professional woman anyway, is the desire to belong to a community. To be single, parent or no, is often to be cast aside and cast away, the stubborn avatar of independence, failure to launch by failure to merge, somehow. And for women, this failure is always depicted as our own problem, our defect.

My Mom, some time in the 1970s. Working it.

If you’re a single mother, especially if you’re not white, this shaming can be relentless and unceasing. Even though it makes perfect economic sense that fewer women are getting married because there are diminishing returns for many of us on that front.

My friend, the lovely writer and Beyond Baby Mamas founder Stacia L. Brown, wrote recently at The Atlantic about how unwed mothers feel about being unwed, noting that when statistics come out about single mothers, people tend to talk around them instead of to them about their feelings.

As the child of a single mother, I remember this acutely. No one ever asked my mother about her feelings. If they had, they’d have found nuances that didn’t match their disrespectful portraits: she had internalized enough heart breaks that she hid her deepest self, even from me. She was a registered Republican in New York State (!) during the Reagan era, even while we were in the cross hairs of Reagan’s draconian policies related to the poor.

What I wish I had known then, when I was internalizing messages that I was a part of a larger social problem because I had a single mother who worked and went to school all the time, trying to be better, was that pretty much everyone grows up in one form of dysfunction or another. Steven Spielberg spoke powerfully about this on 60 Minutes, memoirist Mary Karr writes extensively about this in The Liar’s Club, which I just finished, and the list goes on. Pathology is not just a single black woman’s thing.

Except, when people start talking about women who are mothers who aren’t married, they are inferring that these are unfit women. They don’t respect them. They suggest that it is somehow, defying reason, the easiest thing in the world to raise a child alone, when in fact, it appears to be the hardest job on the planet.

Consternation over our parenting of our children, it has to be said, is a coded way (in the same way that arguments about single black women is) of saying that without “proper course-correcting” we don’t have the instincts God gave us to be good women, caregivers or anything else without the help of the state, the government, smart people and, basically, men. Jim Rigby, an eloquent pastor, writing about the death of Chinua Achebe, notes that we are all victims of the narrative of the American Empire:

It is not our fault that we were born in a vast and brutal military empire, but it is our responsibility to do what we can to lessen the violence of empire against our sisters and brothers of the earth. It begins when we can recognize their humanity. We may not have the answer on how to undo the violence of empire but, at the very least, we can get our minds and hearts free.

We are all always just doing the best that we can. My deep affection and longing for my mother, in spite of our history together, is entrenched in honor. I honor her for what she had to give, even when it wasn’t exactly all that I needed, or even close.

It’s very rare that someone is just mailing it in when it comes to their children, in particular, I’ve noticed. Even my own mother, who was divorced by the time she had me, had a lot of flaws, but all things considered, I turned out pretty great, albeit with a few bruises and existential identity issues.

How is it possible that the world keeps spinning and children somehow magically grow up to unwed mothers without being maladjusted soul-sucking malcontents?

Well, single parents are incredibly resourceful human beings — the children they love and adore require that. What my mother, the most resourceful person I ever met in the pre-Internet era and since, didn’t know how to give me she found someone who could. The village raised me, even in places completely unfriendly, if not downright hostile, to kids, like New York City. This was a coalition of friends, relatives and mentors. A multiracial cast of people who provided much more to me than my biological father would ever be able to offer me.

Beyond that, what I find fascinating about discussions about single mothers, particularly those who aren’t necessarily highly educated or high earners, is that few writers and reporters interrogate their own assumptions about “the right way” to raise children, whether they have them or not. In Daring Greatly, another book I just finished, by Brene Brown, she writes that one of the most harmful things parents can do is judge other parents for how they raise their children.

It seems to me that the last thing single mothers and single fathers (the latter of which are almost entirely invisible in any debate — do they not exist?) need is hand wringing over the economic ramifications of their personal choices or the insinuation, essentially, that the rest of us have to pay for what we also insinuate are their careless mistakes. I was made intentionally, loved with a greater intensity than most kids can ever hope for and while I could have had more stability, and life would have been different with a father in the home, there’s no telling if it would have been better. Conjecture that promises a narrative that isn’t true isn’t an answer, and it doesn’t change the course of personal lives.

56 days ago Short URL 6 Comments

Beyond Baby Mamas/economics/journalism/media/money/motherhood/mothers/popular culture/relationships/single fathers/Single Life/single parents/Stacia L. Brown/The Atlantic

Mar

Singles in the News: Getting Branded, Online Dating (also) sucks for Men and the problem with Leaning In

“Maybe a woman has a child without being married; maybe a woman gets married, has children, and then divorces; maybe a woman marries and Mother Nature cheats her out of motherhood. But all of these women got on base: only the single, never married, childless woman is like the batter who just never hit the ball or got on base – no marriage, strike one; no relationship, strike two; no kids: strike three. She’s out – outcast from the community of ‘The Family.’” — Diane Torre, The Scarlet Letter S, at Psychology Today.

“Single women – with and without kids – have special challenges in their work lives that most married women do not. They have no spousal salary as a back-up plan. In some ways, they need greater opportunities and protections, but they get fewer. If, for example, a married woman becomes ill and her spouse has a job covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act, that spouse can take time off under the Act to care for her. No peer in the life of a single woman (such as a close friend or a sibling) can take time to care for her.” — Dr. Bella DePaulo, Is the Lean-In Conversation Going to Leave Out Single Women? at her Single at Heart blog

“I tell all my single guy friends to watch out for online dating. It is a sad, soul-crushing place where good guys go to die a slow death by way of ignored messages and empty inboxes. You will peruse profiles and find a few women who aren’t posing in a bathroom with their stomachs exposed. You will look for things in common in their profile (they like Scrabble too!). You will send them a note, carefully crafted to show interest and attention to detail. The first seven will not respond. The next one will, but she spells “you” as “u” and you will let the conversation stall.” — Why Online Dating Sucks for Men at AlterNet (reposted from Role Reboot)

64 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

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Feb

Singles in the News: Online dating is ruining our lives and…Are we all sluts now?

The Atlantic makes my life seem hard, but it’s all math and not personal.

“While us men have been taking a browbeating for the past several decades, things are looking up! Those of us who have “made it” have our pick of the litter.” — a commenter on the article, The Worst Cities for College-Educated Women Trying to Find a Decent Date.

Runner up for my favorite comment: “So non college educated men are indecent?”

*Paging Olivia Pope*

“Ashley Madison—the website bearing the tagline “Life is Short. Have an Affair”—has released its ranking of the top 10 US cities for cheaters. It drew its conclusions from its own subscriber base, looking at which cities had the most registered users and, based on its population, the highest per capita membership. The, er, winner? Washington, DC, is king when it comes to would-be adulterers, with some 37,943 registered users and the highest per capita stats—and 30 new subscribers per day, reports the Post.” — The Best City for Cheaters is…Washington, D.C.

There are two Texas cities on this list, but thankfully, Austin is not in the top 10.

But 93% of us would marry for love.

“What are the advantages of marriage? According to the public, it is easier for a married person than a single person to raise a family (77% say so). But in other realms of life asked about in the 2010 Pew Research survey, most people do not think either married or single people have an easier time of it. In fact, about half or more think there is no difference between being married or single in the ease of having a fulfilling sex life, being financially secure, finding happiness, getting ahead in a career or having social status.” – Love and Marriage, Pew Social & Demographic Trends

In other words, there is no rest for the weary.

So many choices nobody dates in real life anymore.

“The positive aspects of online dating are clear: the Internet makes it easier for single people to meet other single people with whom they might be compatible, raising the bar for what they consider a good relationship. But what if online dating makes it too easy to meet someone new? What if it raises the bar for a good relationship too high? What if the prospect of finding an ever-more-compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, in which we keep chasing the elusive rabbit around the dating track?” A Million First Dates: How online romance is threatening monogamy, by Dan Slater at the Atlantic

You have read some of my thoughts on my own personal disaster with online dating. I think it’s important to mention here, as I have elsewhere, that online dating for black women sucks the hardest and is the biggest waste of time. There is research to back up my personal claims: UC Berkeley found that black women had the hardest time finding a mate online, since men essentially exclude black women from their choices, regardless of their race. OKCupid changed my life with their data showing that black women are often ignored, basically, in online dating.

I mention these links, facts and statistics mostly to point out that I have never found it “too easy” to meet someone new. And I think most women would agree with me. I know a dozen black women who would also agree with me. But as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, black people who want to date online aren’t necessarily going to OKCupid anyway — it’s just us interracial inclined women, apparently.

Anyway, I think that there’s some truth in this article, and I’m curious about Dan Slater’s book. I’m curious to hear your thoughts.

“Have I been using that word (slut) wrong this whole time?”

“Not that I’m a prude, I’ve got enough Cinemax-quality bedtime stories to keep me warm well into my dotage, but is there really no difference between being a self-aware woman making healthy sexual decisions on her own terms and being a big slutty slut?” – So We’re All Sluts Now? by my dear After Plumcake

I can’t even find the best smarty pants thing to say about her post, because it’s fantastic.

Feb

The audacity of happiness

One of my favorite quotes

When I was younger, I collected inspirational quotes. They were my life lines.

Social media and networking make it easier to get a stream of motivation delivered straight to my phone much of the time, so I don’t do this at all much anymore. As a teenager, these were mini-meditations and prayers.

If you’re going through hell, keep going.

Those who say it is impossible should not interrupt the person doing it.

The challenge is to be yourself in a world that is trying to make you like everyone else.

When I first became a newspaper reporter, my mentor, Tommy Miller gave me a card bearing the Goethe quote above. Just trust yourself.

It took time and patience for me understand the fullness of that. You could probably say that about most things in life, I suppose. But trust and happiness are not my strong points.

When I finished the book in the winter, after the anniversary of my mother’s death and in the season of winter I love — the icy winds outside while I’m inside curled up with a book — I felt a sense of something that I couldn’t quite locate. All of the natural emotions that come with completing something you’ve worked hard on were present: anxiety, pride, excitement. But there was a smaller, lighter feeling, one that I was tamping down with other things to do.

I believe ~~normal~~ most people call it happiness.

I look at some skepticism with the word happy. I know that makes the title of the blog a bit ironic, but I have always aimed for happiness, even when I didn’t quite know what to do with it. When you get used to being in survival mode, instead of thriving and soaking up life’s joys, happiness feels like a tall order. It feels isolating in what one woman calls our “currency of misery” in this great blog post at OM Times, “Dare to Be Happy“:

To choose to self-love, can feel quite unpopular. It can be lonely. It will be challenged, and most undoubtedly tested. See this as the negative resistance of the ego and be prepared to face it – head on. Do not take the negative resistance and challenges of others personally. If anything, see it as a sign that you are breaking free from pernicious vicious cycle of self-loathing and self-controlling ego that is causing so much pain.

Pain and misery used to be my main adversaries but they were present so often, I got used to them, like my old friends, self-doubt and depression. When you need help and comfort, when your weaknesses are on full display, people flock to you, I learned. One of my closest friends says people come into our lives to teach us lessons and then we move on to the next thing, or they stay until we have fully learned the lesson. I believe that wholeheartedly, but I don’t just hoard books – I have been a hoarder of friendships and one-sided relationships that made me feel powerful even when I was actually weak and terribly afraid.

As I’ve stepped into a happier, calmer season, I’ve let go of relationships that required that I chime in with negative news before mentioning the good in my life. I used to think of this as abandoning folks who had been there for me when I most needed them, but what I realized is that my intuition is truly my best guide, and one that I’ve honed with a lot of solitude and the inspiration of the right people. What if the happiness fades? When will the other shoe drop? Writing through these thoughts and emotions is absolutely liberating.

And the trust I have, for myself, for the process of making room for new people and new experiences, has yielded more beauty than I could have imagined. Aiming for happiness is a worthy pursuit. Maybe because we deserve to be happy, maybe because it is a part of life just like suffering and misery. Nothing lasts for ever, light or dark. To paraphrase Whitney Houston, the ride is worth whatever fall may come — if indeed it ever does.

93 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Happiness/OM Times/relationships/Single Life

Feb

Singles in the News: When dating is like The Hunger Games, good teeth and the Manhattan Myth

Can I haz a mate who writes good?

“Among the “must haves,” women want respect and men want someone in whom to trust and confide; both rate a sense of humor as key qualities for a partner. When judging a potential date, both men and women rate teeth at the top, followed by grammar. The online survey of 5,481 individuals was conducted by MarketTools Inc. for the Dallas-based dating website Match.com.” – USAToday covers a survey looking at what singles want. (Check out the infographics…funny women win!)

Live anywhere else and you lose:

“Television would have us believe that, in order to lead independent and successful lives, we must live in New York City.” — Bitch Magazine’s blog, “TV’s Manhattan Myth: Do Single Women Have to Live in New York to be Successful?

Dating in your thirties is just like The Hunger Games, Amirite?!

“It’s not like I don’t ever date. But as you get older, there are longer spells in between dates. My perception—and that of my many thirtysomething, unattached girlfriends—is there’s a run on single men our age.” — from an essay in TimeOut Chicago. May the odds be ever in your favor, honey.

We’re good. You saw him first. Excelsior.

101 days ago Short URL 2 Comments

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Feb

The Root: Dating While Celibate

…many folks will make you think you’re crazy for not having sex. Put this in perspective: There are a lot of women who are having sex — wild, swing-from-the-chandelier, they-only-do-that-in-pornos kind of sex — and they are just as single as you are. Sex doesn’t guarantee you any sort of relationship, much less a marriage. – Demetria Lucas, Dating While Celibate: Men Who Respect Your Choice Exist

As much as I dislike using statistics to generalize, I think it’s worth looking at data when it comes to sex and singles. We can talk about all the black woman dating numbers later, but for now, let’s look at the statistic that 95 percent of Americans have sex before marriage. Eighty-five percent actually approve of sex before marriage. The biggest factor in delaying sex until marriage is religiosity, even though abstinence-only programs and their ilk tend to backfire.

So, most people are doing it, religious or not.

I think it’s healthy to get to know someone before having sex, regardless of whether you want to get married or not, but I don’t judge people who decide that they want to have sex just for the sake of doing the damn thing. Because marriage is not for everyone. And not everyone can legally get married.

But for single black women, in particular, celibacy is a double-edged sword. If we’re talking about black women who only want to date black men, that’s a really small group or marriage market. As noted in The Root comments, which I usually skip, a number of men consider women who claim celibacy or abstinence suspect and move quickly on to a willing, easier prospect. So while I’d like to believe that Demetria is on the right track – just hold out for the rare man who will respect you — I wonder about how singles who choose not to have sex deal with that dilemma.

Choosing celibacy always makes me think of that line in Love Jones where Larenz Tate tells Nia Long, “But we’ve already done it before!” I do think there’s wisdom in taking a break, but I wonder if that’s a lot of ask unless you’re a celebrity like Lenny Kravitz or Lady Gaga. But for those of you who are dating and celibate, do you agree that it’s a challenge? Is it worth it to wait?

My two cents is that I always hear from people who are celibate or claim that they were until they got married that it was a good decision. But the downside of that anecdotal data is that I don’t know that many people it actually applies to.

112 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

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Jan

Dealing with Rejection at Hope from Nope

A friend of mine wrote about this guy, who has been shoring up his tolerance for rejection on his blog, Hope From Nope.

He’s experimenting with asking for things and hearing no a lot. I love it. He has really great insights that are pretty useful. It turns out he’s married, but this is what he says about asking a woman out to dinner:

Rejection hurts, and the fear of rejection cripples. One of the most dreaded rejections comes from romantic settings, where people often associate rejection of the request (going out on a date) with rejection of the person. That’s why many people are very afraid to approach the opposite sex with romantic requests.

In term of romance, although I am not a relationship or pickup expert, as a person in a blissful marriage, I gained some perspective in this request. Whether or not I get a ‘yes’ here doesn’t change the fact that my wife loves me and is very attracted to me. That’s really all that matters. Moreover, even in a hypothetical world where I still hadn’t met my wife yet, it still doesn’t change the fact there is a woman (my future wife), who is a perfect match for me, would love me and be attracted to me. I just haven’t met her yet. So even if I get rejected 100 more times, I shouldn’t be discouraged, because I simply need to keep looking to find my wife.

Learning: When you get turned down with a date request, don’t equate rejection with the idea that you are not attractive. You just haven’t met your match yet. Keep looking!

Well, easy for him to say because he’s married. But…noted!

118 days ago Short URL Comments

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Jan

Thirty five in honor of 35

The mid-thirties sounds ancient to me, but here I am. My birthday was last weekend. Hello, 35.

My friends have helped me figure out that I grew up as a tail-end member of Generation X, and in my twenties, it was plausible for writers to publish their first books and memoirs when they were 25, so I felt like a slacker even though I was an overachiever.

Well, even though I finally wrote a book (PLUG: Please buy it here!) it did not happen the way I thought it would. I didn’t expect to be rich or famous, but I did hope to have an agent, and a publisher, to have a slew of acknowledgments pointing to all the famous and talented writers and publishers and agents.

The first rule of my thirties that I learned a little earlier than my actual 30th birthday is that sometimes (OK, often) what we want or what we think we want is not the best thing for us. The things that grow and mature us can be just as amazing as what we think we want, even if they’re more difficult than what we envisioned – especially if they’re harder than what our daydreams offer.

Too late to get this shirt, I guess.

Vanessa Martir, one of my writing sisters, posted something similar to this on her birthday, and I wanted to follow suit. I didn’t actually envision what 35 would be like – I spent a lot of my childhood and teen years thinking that 25 must be pretty old – but my older relatives and friends all say this is when things get good. The following is a list of things I wish I’d known a decade ago; maybe I would have had more fun, I would have been less hard on myself.

1. It gets better: Why did I think two decades was as good as everything was going to get? I’m not sure. While it’s true that things get more complex as you get older, they’re also a lot more fun.

2. People are amazing: Sonia Sotomayor, Wise Latina Supreme Court justice and single lady has been doing press for her new memoir, My Beloved World, and she makes it a point to say that she is not self-made, which I respect. None of us are islands. And with the right people in our lives we can do amazing things.

3. People are complicated: I like the superhero’s approach to life. We all have alternative faces we show the world, in one way or another. What matters is that we know who we are and we allow other people room to be complicated if they need to be or want to be. Or have to be.

4. Life only gets more complex: My mentor and friend Evelyn C. White said this to me and I know that she’s right. It seems more and more true the more time passes. I do hope it’s not like a Rubix cube by the time it’s time for me to go.

5. Get your life: A friend of my sister’s has said this to me a couple of times with glee and the phrase makes me smile. We only get one shot, so I aim to wring the most of out of every experience, even when it’s frustrating and hard and lonely. Getting my life means everything. It makes me happy so I can make the ones I love happy.

6. Everything ain’t for everybody: I was super insecure in my 20s, though I tried faking confidence until it felt natural. I realized at 30 that I was trying too hard to fit in and thinking too much about what other people thought. It was a relief to shed that. Sometimes I still slip up and I forget that people’s reactions to me or my life are more about them than they are about me (I loved reading The Four Agreements for this reason). The older I get, the less I slip up.

7. Freedom is more than a notion: It is also not free. Which is fine. We all have to pay what my writing hero James Baldwin called the price of the ticket. Any dues I have to pay are what I consider rent for being here on earth and taking up space.

8. God/The Universe will give you what you need if you learn how to ask: I’ve always been bad for asking for help, but I’m a believer in the divine because of how often I am provided with exactly what I need.

9. No woman is an island: We already covered this, but I’m stubborn and it took me a long time to learn how to lean on folks, too. How to be vulnerable enough to ask and wise enough to let go of expectation: that’s what I work on daily.

10. Vulnerability feels like hell but it is the only way to live: Yeah, vulnerable has looked to me in the past like a long euphemism for weak. But Brene Brown and Marianne Williamson and a ton of other writers have shown me the beauty of vulnerability. (My favorite so far is The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes)

11. Surrendering/leaning into change is frightening but endlessly rewarding: A couple of days before I left the newspaper industry, I was freaking out about all the changes in my life, and terrified that I was doing the wrong thing. When I went into work, I clicked on something that erased my hard drive and essentially wiped the slate clean. I knew that I had to surrender what I had been holding on to. And I have not regretted my decision for one second since.

12. Aim for excellence not perfection: When I published the book, I could immediately see all the flaws in formatting, in publicity for it, the people that I forgot to mention this time around, the ways that it was different and maybe less marketable than other books about single life. Then I remembered that I like aiming for excellence because perfection is impossible. It’s hard to enjoy life when you’re trying to be perfect.

13. Dance, Live, Sing like nobody is watching: I saw that quote when I was much younger. Yeah, whatever! People are watching, they always are – it’s Big Brother! But I would still try to shut out the invisible and visible eyes. I made friends who encouraged me to forget the world in favor of fun at least once or twice a year. For 35, I aim for much more than that.

14. Or, like everybody is watching: I am an extroverted introvert, so there is that side of me that’s a ham. I was an actor in high school, after all. So sometimes I like to put on a show. It’s always fun, at least for a little while. The pressure to be perfect can creep in and ruin the fun, but only if you let it.

15. Pain is weakness leaving the body: I always think of the loud grunting dudes in the weight section at the gym when I think of this, but when I feel really sad and teary and down, I think of how important it is to release things by way of tears or sighs or a long vent session followed by ice cream or chocolate.

16. Heroes are more than sandwiches: And you can be your own hero.

17. Nothing makes me feel as useful in the world as sharing my talent and gifts: Someone wiser than me said that our gifts and talents are our rent for getting to live on this planet. And I believe that with all of my heart.

18. Sharing and generosity are your rent for taking up space on the planet: That people are transformed, moved or inspired by anything I do amazes me. But I am humbled by the many talents and gifts of the people I admire, too. So it all moves in a circle.

19. You can do some things but you can’t do everything: My friend and writer extraordinaire Courtney Martin tweeted something about this over a year ago now, and it lingered in my brain.

20. We are our worst critics: What I have told my students is that the world has enough criticism for you and anything you do in your ambitions to be great. I tell them what I tell myself: don’t add to the criticism chorus.

21. Drama loves company: So the happy part of being Single & Happy comes from cultivating serenity and peace. It’s also meant that some people have left my life, don’t like what I create, can’t stand letting their lives be good and without drama. I still pray for them and wish them well, because I remember when I liked connecting with folks because I had some drama to share.

22. Have a vision: There’s something you have to contribute here that nobody else can give to the world. It’s easier to be happy when you’re working toward creating that.

23. I like lists, but sometimes they’re prisons: I used to make a five-year, ten-year and 15-year plan every year for my birthday. Then I realized that those lists were like New Year’s resolutions. They were inspiring to think about, but what if I decided I didn’t want to do everything on the list? What if I couldn’t make everything on the list happen?

24. Find out if you’ve got a prison you’ve put yourself in: This is another gift from my friend and mentor, Evelyn. Sometimes we blame other people for putting us in a box, when really, it’s a prison we made for ourselves out of fear.

25. What other people think of me is none of my business: Also, other people’s opinions don’t pay the bills.

26. Honor your gut: In dating and in life, I have always made a bad decision when I went against my intuition. Always.

27. Learn to fail gracefully: I fail all the time. I am often ashamed and humbled by my failures, and I don’t share them as publicly as I do my successes because my ego gets in the way. But I try to take what’s useful and leave the rest.

28. Learn to win gracefully: Because I’m competitive and I like to win, this has been a hard lesson for me to take seriously, but I practice.

29. Cooking is awesome: I didn’t learn how to cook at my mother’s side when I was a kid, but teaching myself how to cook and learning how to make things that are healthy (for the most part) has been transformative. I save money, I feel better and I feel like a rock star in the kitchen even when my dishes turn out slightly weird sometimes.

30. Believe in yourself and your future: This is especially important for singles. Maybe you don’t have one other person in your life to be your cheerleader, but you can be your own cheerleader.

31. Know when to fold ‘em: Sometimes things just don’t work out the way you want them to. I love the quote that says we should let go of the life we planned in order to make room for the life that is waiting for us.

32. Be flexible about your life plan/manifestos: I can be stubborn and inflexible, which is no fun and doesn’t make me happy. Sometimes you need to be vigilant about your dreams for your life. But sometimes you have to compromise. I hear this is good practice for love and relationships, too.

33. We are our own heroes: I have a long list of people who inspire me with their courage, creativity and generosity. But at the end of the day, I want to move from being inspired to actually implementing my dreams and visions. I want to live the kind of life that will leave a legacy of aspiration, true. But it helps me sleep at night knowing that I was invested in my own salvation, too.

34. Growing up is a privilege: I always considered it a given, especially once I was working for a big-time newspaper and living in beautiful parts of the country. But we know from Sandy Hook elementary to Hurricane Sandy that some people don’t get to grow up and live to see even their teens or twenties.

35. Let the beauty you love be the work that you do. I think that speaks for itself.

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Single & Happy

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